Victorian Cartes de Visite
A householder in this island of Colonsay (where I live) asked me to look through the library of his deceased parents and I came across an interesting photographic album. With his permission I have made simple digital copies and I am attempting to identify the subjects. I have already met with some success, and I was especially pleased when I identified one person by using the image-search facility in Google.
This led me to the blindingly-obvious thought that every such Carte de Visite will have duplicates, probably at least half-a-dozen or a dozen copies will have been made and distributed in every case. After all, if one booked a photographic studio, put on one’s best clothes, turned up for the appointment, went back a week later to collect the result etc., it was all a bit of a hassle so one would make it worthwhile and get a good few copies. Some of these copies will have survived, and in some cases the owners will have identified them. Common sense suggests that anybody with a labelled photograph would be keen to make contact with anybody else who had a copy, identified or not, since both parties might have other images or documents to share.
There must be millions of unidentified Cartes de Visite worldwide, and it should be possible to establish a comparison centre on the Internet. As we know, this already exists for paintings and buildings – the user simply submits a digital image of a scene and the system offers the closest matches, sometimes with great success.
I wonder if an respected institution such as British Photographic would think it worthwhile to try to advance such a scheme? It might be a bit daunting to actually undertake, but perhaps an approach to Google might be enough to get the idea adopted?
P.S. As an example of just one such album, the images to which I refer are at http://www.colonsay.info/text/Kindred1%20McNeill%20images.htm
